Many people have contributed to Woz.org. The questions and answers are really what makes this site interesting.
Pre 2000
Woz.org was originally set up and managed by one of Woz’s old Homebrew buddies, Dan Sokol. He is still managing a lot of things as well as all the other crazy stuff he is involved in.
2000-2010
Woz always received a lot of e-mail and answered all of it personally. When the TNT movie “Pirates of Silicon Valley” came out, hundreds of e-mails with all sorts of Questions came pouring in. As always, Woz insisted on answering all the questions personally. He had forwarded a couple of these questions and answers to a friend, Al Luckow. Al thought, “Wouldn’t it be neat if everybody could read these.” That’s when the marathon postings began with Woz and Al up late, posting all these questions and answers. The postings seemed to feed even more questions and then questions about the questions. Al, being a designer had to change the looks and feel, but now that meant he just volunteered to do the site.
2010-2017
We kept the site simple for over a decade, with straight HTML. Nothing hackable and able to be viewed by any device. Well, nice as that was, it was time to get with the program. Al asked for help from his GeekSpeak buddy Lyle Troxell, who suggested implementing a Drupal site. Lyle said, “It’s open source, its very flexible, and why not?” So now that means Lyle had unwittingly volunteered to work on the site. Together, Al and Lyle built the back end. So then Woz, Al, Dan, Lyle and Woz’ wife Janet were able to easily edit on the fly whenever they feel like it. This is not a mega corporation with thousands of engineers. It’s pretty much just us. We also recently got some help from a guy in Paris named Charles van Valkenburg. He volunteered to enter in a lot of the letters Woz has been answering.
2018-Now
Although the site was incredibly secure, Drupal began to show its age and we wanted to try something different. WordPress had been one of the CMS options considered and seemed like a nice change. A random e-mail from a brazilian Senior Interaction Designer and Front-End Developer named Rian Dutra popped into our inbox. Rian was big into Apple and wanted to know if he could volunteer he services on the Drupal site. Al said, “Well, we’re thinking about going with WordPress now…” Rian responded, “I can do that too!” So after some back and forth, Rian and Al redesigned the site in WordPress. See, sometimes a random e-mail does work.
Being all volunteers, Al, Lyle, Rian, George and Dan all juggled their jobs and schedules to coordinate to finally get this site live September 12, 2018. Lots more to come.
It’s neat to be able to interact personally with, as Slashdot puts it, “the head nerd in whose shadow all others dwell“. But the credit for this site really goes out to you, dear reader. For all your interesting questions and for remembering the man who changed computers forever. Thanks.